Social Media ROI: Are we comparing like with like?

[Summary: To measure social media ROI we need to know about the ROI of paper-based outreach]

Credit: PhotoGraham - Creative Commons - (Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic) - http://www.flickr.com/photos/82278008@N00/283496355

If you've ever handed out a leaflet to a class of school students in tutorial you may be familiar with then finding 1/2 those leaflets dropped in the bin on the way out (recycling bin hopefully…).

If you look at the piles of paper on most office desks – and then ask the desk inhabitant how many of these documents they've actually read – and how many they've responded to in any way – you may well find their desk is collonised by many unread and unresponded too leaflets, magazines, reports and papers. Even though all those leaflets had a tear-off slip, and the magazines had a letters page.

Printing 1000 leaflets doesn't mean 1000 leaflets get read.

But leaflets don't report back how many people have read it.

A blog post does.

And a blog post might only be reporing 150 readers, and 2 comments.

But then, did two people write in to respond to the leaflet?

If we're comparing the print-run of your paper publications, with the number of people who've read what you've written online – then it strikes me that we're not comparing like-with-like.

Beth Kanter is writing a lot at the moment about measuing the Return On Investment (ROI) of social media.

Which has got me thinking about the need for an initial case study on measuring the ROI of a traditional charity publication, or the ROI of including a letters page in a paper-based supporters newsletter to help us in developing comparisons and a baseline to work with?

(Note: I'm thinking broadly in the context of basic social media interactions that involve offering information, inviting feedback and possibly getting into a conversation – not in terms of those that are involved in fundraising etc. when measuring ROI may be a simpler process…)

Photo Credit: Waste Paper by PhotoGraham

5 thoughts on “Social Media ROI: Are we comparing like with like?”

  1. interesting – I think this is a great tack to take, comparing the ROI of social media with the ROI of traditional printing of materials.
    The fact is, there is a tougher burden of proof laid on new methods of communications than on old ones. The old ways may have minimal returns themselves, but at least they are (considered to be) a known quantity.

  2. Great conversation…lets keep it up. Us social media professionals have to establish a standard set of metrics for determining social media marketing ROI before the masses will follow.

    They need to see case studies and measured results before they’ll follow.

  3. It is verry true that a lot of those leaflets don’t get read but that has to be taken into consideration when printing them. Media today seems to be a lot and a lot more about adverising than about actually informing us about something of actual interest. That is why we tend not to pay too much attention to it.

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